F-35 Strike Fighter Success: Real or Simulated?

Amid bad news, Lockheed takes victory lap in the Beltway bubble.

WASHINGTON — They call Washington a bubble. A la-la land. Home of the “Deep State.” A long-forgotten 1980’s television series, ‘Tales of the Darkside,’ once described “a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit” as our own world. Sounds a bit like Capitol Hill.

Nowhere was that more evident than yesterday, as defense industry giant Lockheed Martin hosted an auspiciously-timed reception on the Hill to tout its multi-billion dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which as anyone reading in this space would know has been more than 16 years in development, and plagued by everything from poor performance reviews and cost overruns, to grounding over a lack of spare parts and tussles over technical data and cybersecurity concerns.

Then there is the expense to the taxpayer, which as of June is projected to be more than $406 billion to complete, and another $1.4 trillion over the life of the program to be maintained. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said at the time there was a 60 percent increase in the cost estimates from 2001 to 2012 due to three major restructurings of the program. But the military kept building more planes—even delivering them to partner countries—throughout the development stage, even though operational testing has yet to begin, and won’t, until late-2018, at the soonest. That’s left the taxpayer with at least $1.7 billion in retrofitting costs as plans change and more technical bells and whistles are put onto the planes. Spare parts are in short supply, and the funds to retrofit all of the older prototypes aren’t readily available. Marine Corps Capt. Dan Grazier at the Project for Government Oversight (POGO) reported in October, that may leave some 108 planes behind as “concurrency orphans,” not fit for service, ever. At more than $100 million per plane (the military has so far built more than 250), that’s a lot of coin to be left idle in a hanger.

Lockheed F-35 cockpit simulator. (Kelley Vlahos)

With all this bad news, and more throughout the month of October, it’s probably no surprise Lockheed was in full-on marketing mode at the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday, complete with a cockpit simulator, a test pilot, and the head of the entire program available to ensure anyone who breezed through the continental breakfast reception that, contrary to everything you’ve heard, things were A-OK on the production line. In fact, at times it sounded like a victory lap.

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“The jet we’re trying to get out there is out there,” said Lockheed test pilot Dan Levin, who cut his teeth on F-16s in the first Gulf War and says the capabilities of the F-35 far outstrip anything he has flown before. “It is more survivable, more stealthy, and more lethal…it’s just a more effective airplane; that’s what we want.”

But what “we want” and what exists today are two different things. As Grazier pointed out to TAC, the planned event was an exercise in the former, a carefully designed artifice that emphasized the hoped-for outcomes of the most expensive program in U.S. military history, while downplaying the very real problems as momentary turbulence. Even the simulator, the flashy draw at the corner of the room, boasted capabilities that recent reviews have said the planes don’t have quite yet.

“It was a great sales pitch, it was interesting, it was neat sitting in the cockpit,” he said afterwards. “But it was a display of the brochure promises, not the finished design. It was how they want it to perform, but not how it performs today.”

Today, Lockheed fully acknowledges there is a payload of problems. But how much damage these problems can do to the planned trajectory of the program depends on whom you talk to. On paper, at least, the outlook doesn’t look good. After Grazier’s “orphans” report, the GAO came out with another review saying 22 percent of the fleet had been grounded because of a lack of spare parts, with repair capabilities running six years behind. But even if the engineers had the parts, the DoD hasn’t written the requirements yet for repairing the planes, so there’s a lot of confusion about how and when repairs should occur.

More daunting are the issues revolving around the plane’s Autonomic Logistics Information System software (ALIS), which, as the cloud-based computer network that serves as the brain of the plane, is the very core of the F-35’s unique offerings. It is also what is making it a) behind schedule and b) most vulnerable. The GAO said ongoing costs for developing the ALIS (pronounced “Alice”) aren’t fully funded. There’s also the issue of Lockheed’s resistance to giving DoD all of the technical data necessary to getting ALIS working and maintained effectively (an issue over intellectual property and the parameters of contract rights). Holding out, coincidentally, would likely make Lockheed the sole source contractor for the program, forever.

Furthermore, since the plane’s entire functionality depends on “the cloud,” the risks of a cyberattack rendering one plane or an entire fleet, completely useless is absolutely real. “Given the jet’s low-observable characteristics, advanced defensive systems, and other sensors, a cyberattack would be an attractive option for any enemy force,” writes Joseph Trevithick, for The Warzone. “Why would an enemy use a $500,000 air-to-air or surface-to-air and put their personnel and equipment at risk in an attempt to down an F-35 when a simple worm may be able to do the same to a whole fleet of F-35s?”

When asked Thursday about these and other sticky issues, F-35 program executive vice president and general manager Jeff Babione, swung at each with relative ease. Cost? Lockheed has brought down the unit price for each plane 60 percent since the first lot and eight percent since the previous contract, delivering a “5th generation aircraft” at “4th generation cost.”

On the issue of the more than $1 trillion in lifetime costs: “It’s a world-wide program and the scope and scale has never been attempted before…with these complexities you’re going to have challenges.” However, “we’re going to take the same innovation” used to take down the per-plane expenses to “reduce the cost” of maintaining the program over time, he told TAC. Spare parts? “It’s still a relatively new airplane,” and “we’re still working with congress and the Joint Program Office” to identify the needs and make sure there is enough money for it.

“What we do know is that if you look year after year, the cost is dropping.”

The F-35 program is such a web of overlapping budgets and projections that it is difficult to tell if that is true, though the GAO’s report of 2012 to the present generally bears that out. Lockheed did get the unit costs down. Yet everything else is creeping up or open to interpretation.

Dan Grazier and a map of F-35-connected jobs and money in each state. (Kelley Vlahos)

But really, beyond the positive “update” Lockheed said it wanted to bring to Capitol Hill Thursday, what was this exhibition really about? Perhaps a little damage control, but more critically, it seems, to remind members of congress how much their own political assets are tied to this gargantuan program.

A map, generated by Lockheed and set on the table with the other handouts, shows how many suppliers and jobs—directly or indirectly—are tied to the F-35, plus economic impact, in each state. For example, in Florida alone, there are 18,480 such jobs and 98 suppliers with $2 billion impacted. The wealth, it would seem, is spread around and keeps everyone invested.

“If you start opposing the F-35 budgets your political opponent is going to say, ‘hey, I’m going to fight for those jobs,” noted Grazier. “(Lockheed) just wants to remind them of that.”

Whatever the case, this is just one more example of things not being exactly what they seem in the Beltway bubble. For a short while, in a brightly lit room at Rayburn, the F-35 was what it was promised. But, as Grazier points out, that assumption is just more than a little off the runway.

“If we can’t field a fully functioning fighter plane in less than 20 years, then there is something seriously wrong with our procurement system.”

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is executive editor of The American Conservative. Follow her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC.

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24 Responses to F-35 Strike Fighter Success: Real or Simulated?

“More daunting are the issues revolving around the plane’s Autonomic Logistics Information System software (ALIS), which, as the cloud-based computer network that serves as the brain of the plane, is the very core of the F-35’s unique offerings . . .”

Another reason against having a General serve as the Secretary of Defense. After living his entire life in the cronied-up cocoon of the Pentagon, from Mattis’ PoV, (taxpayer) money is no object. Expect “Warrior-Hero” Mad Dog to lose little sleep over the myriad hyper-busted acquisition programs topped by the F-35 fiasco.

Coupled with the saturation bombing of the American citizenry with fear-mongering and threat inflation by the Propaganda Directorate, there will be no effective DoD reform out of the E-Ring of the 5-Sided Pleasure Palace.

ALIS has nothing to do with the JSF’s fly-by-wire. It’s in the name: LOGISTIC. It runs diagnostics about what parts it thinks might need replacement and conveys that to the user.

Also, the GAO criticizes every program. There wouldn’t be a successful US fighter since at least the F-16 if they were to be taken at face value. It’s good to have that kind of voice, but they aren’t the only one. Let me provide some examples of GAO doomsaying that didn’t really pan out:

This whole “If we can’t field a fully functioning fighter plane in less than 20 years, then there is something seriously wrong with our procurement system.” is entirely disingenuous. Why? Because the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen, and Dassault Rafale also took about 20 years to come to fruition.

But Billy, surely the European MIC is ruining things?

It also taken the Chinese aviation industry, who don’t really need to worry about pesky things like capitalism about 20 years to get their stealth fighters into production, and that’s without having to chunks of the R&D themselves. Perhaps modern fighter aircraft are just really complicated and take a while to rigorously test.

@EliteCommInc
For someone who doesn’t seem to be a fan of the Jews, you sure do a lot of kvetching.

Part of L-M’s two-pronged assault on taxpayer hearts and minds. Have you noticed what’s currently playing in the, ahem, Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater at Smithsonian Air & Space? If you, like my family and I just did, took a look at “Aircraft Carrier: Guardians of the Sea 3D” hoping to see a lot of currently-deployed (and Boeing-built) F/A-18 hornets in action, you’d be disappointed to see instead a 42-minute infomercial for the F-35.

If these guys were as good at building a next-gen air warfare platform as they are at stealth self-promotion, our near-peer adversaries would already be tossing in the towel.

When the “Autonomic Logistics Information System software (ALIS), which, as the cloud-based computer network that serves as the brain of the plane,” crashes (not a good word to associate with aircraft) will we say “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”?

@John Shannon
It isn’t so much that the plane needs “always on” internet, it is the ALIS system. Basically ALIS is a fancy version of the maintenance software on your care. Plug ALIS in and it will diagnose issues with the F35. It is supposed to predict the next parts to go down, request those parts, and speed up the repair cycle. However….

If you don’t have the bandwidth to push to ALIS, you can’t make a request. If your sneak a worm into the system that puts in false alerts you can ground the fleet due to ghost ‘maintenance issues’. The entire F35 is software based so you could also sneak in a program to, say, turn off missile guidance or radar.

No network is entirely secure and an airplane can only be hacked if it gets plugged in. So, the ALIS is the weak link.

I think the comments are missing the message. It isn’t about re-fits, cost over-runs, or even dodgey electronics. It’s about ‘the churn’ of taxpayer dollars through the economy. ‘Murrica loves the myth that the newest and best military toys will vanquish all foes through shock & awe without firing a shot.

If the gub’mint spent a fraction of the $$ on infrastructure, the nation would be in a much better place and we could put a lot of un- & under-employed to work. Maybe even revitalise skilled trades and value them over very expensive and worthless liberal arts degrees.

But:
1 – that isn’t ‘sexy’ enough to garner votes
2 – small contractors and medium cap; construction companies do not donate to politicians the way military contractors do;
3 – Fat Leonard hasn’t got a slice of the concrete industry [yet];
4 – AIPAC prefers weapons that are subsidised by US taxpayers.

On the one hand, there are about 200 x-35s out there With more coming off the line monthly, which conveniently allows fanboys to claim lower prices.
On the other hand, not even the manufacturer acknowledges that the most difficult part of the program is behind us… Because it’s not, its only just beginning.
This what concurrency does so well… Sets it up so that falling per-plane pricea vmcan be quoted, while the billions needed to fix the dev iaaues just getbt tossed into a different bucket.
Its the equivalent of buying a car for a $1.00, and then being told that you have to pay for all the recalls and fixes to the tune of more $$$ than you should have paid had you been sold the completed product. But hey, you onlyboaid a buck for it, right?

I ran into a former Air Force test pilot at an airshow last year. He had flown just about every jet there was over the years. He described the F-35 as “dogmeat” and said that the F-16 could fly circles around the F-35 – when it could get airborne at all.

Isn’t the future unmanned drones? Couldn’t an enemy deploy 100-200 of the most sophisticated drones available for the cost of 1 F-35? I know we love the romance of pilots, but the country that cynically discards that fantasy first is the country that will win the future.

The F35 is designed to beat the Russians / Chinese, we don’t need it in Afghanistan. The Russians already network their SAM and even fighter squadron radar. An obvious way to beat stealth is to have something like four low frequency nodes in different phases to provide targeting to within 100m. At that point, the missile’s active homing can take over with either infrared, local radar, or both.

Russian ground based systems have enough HW to provide the initial radar guidance to either a ground based missile or a Russian aircraft. Based on their current technology, it would be very presumptuous to assume that they couldn’t do this.

Most journalists who write about the F-35 come off as barely understanding the technology and issues in question, but I give a thumbs-up here to the author for the clarity of the writing.

However, while the problems with the program are laid out pretty well, I do think that there’s some missing context here. And I would note that Dan Grazier/POGO seem to be reflexive critics of every single big ticket defense program. I don’t think I can find an example of any program POGO has ever liked. Pretty sure they were complaining about the Super Hornet 20 years ago also.

As Billy in the comments points out above, most high-end planes take close to 20 years to field these days (the F-22 and F-35 took almost exactly the same length of time to go from first flight to limited service). In many respects, the F-35 is much more the norm than the exception here. That may be an argument for procurement reform, but it’s not an F-35 specific problem.

My layman’s understanding is that development cycles take so long because programs are really risk-averse these days, and want to avoid rushing platforms into service before all the bugs are worked out. If you look at our legacy teen series planes (F-14, ’15, ’16, etc), they all had huge problems even after they entered service. The F-16 crashed so much it was nicknamed the Lawn Dart. The F-35 meanwhile, has not had a single crash or fatality in the program (that’s nearly unprecedented for a fighter plane). If our legacy planes had been built in the days of twitter and 24-hour news cycles, they’d arguably look even worse than the F-35 in terms of program management.

They also take a while because, paradoxically, technology advances so fast, that if you rushed something into service with 2001-era technology, it’d be obsolete almost immediately. As a result, new aircraft programs tend to be designed for continual upgrading with new technology as they come on line throughout the life of the program. Upgrading the legacy planes was a matter of changing actual hardware, but the F-35 is designed to have software patches, just like your iPhone. These “concurrency orphans” the article talks about, aren’t a new thing. Not every F-22 is combat-code for full operations, and many of the early French Rafales weren’t upgraded to the full-specs either.

I’d agree that the plane was very badly managed before 2010, but when the Pentagon overhauled the program and rebaselined the schedule, it started to turn around. The F-35 has not actually fallen behind the new schedule since then. The overall program costs have actually mostly stayed on budget, and the unit price has indeed fallen much faster than most critics were claiming would happen seven years ago. Also; minor nitpick about the lifetime service cost, which is now estimated at $1.2 trillion, not $1.45 (the numbers came down a couple years ago, and it’s worth mentioning that this estimate is for the entire life of the program, and includes all operations and upgrades/maintenance).

Our legacy planes are getting very long in the tooth, and are wearing out (the Marine’s are trying to push the F-35 along quickly, because something like half of their legacy Hornets are broken). We need new planes, period.

Finally, for what it’s worth, F-35 pilots have been pretty much unanimously enthusiastic about the plane (and fighter pilots are not shy about speaking their mind), and it has performed very well in actual exercises. It posted a 20:1 kill ratio at Red Flag (and these war games don’t pull their punches).

Some of these have already been given to Israel,so they must be good.
It should not matter anyway, since none of these are for “defense”, and the Russians (the present enemy, it seems) can easily exceed the requirements to shoot them down if they ever really fly without suffocating the pilots.

The F-35 will be more than a match for its intended purpose when it is ready. But, as usual, the manufacturing process is an expensive nightmare just like every other American and European fighter size aircraft. On top of that LM was foolishly over confident and decided to build F-35’s while testing them. A practice that should never be repeated but they will do it all over again in 2050 when the “low” (cheaper. LOL!) 6th generation prototype takes to the skies.

We’ve been a ‘war-based’ economy since WWII, as eloquently warned by Eisenhower in his famous farewell address. It’s just about the money. It doesn’t matter much whether this thing performs or not. Either we are bombing people that can’t fight back, or if we attack people who can fight back (I don’t even consider the possibility we will be attacked), then it will all be over in a hurry.

Missiles keep getting better faster than fighter planes. When Russia fills the World with S400 (and S500) systems and whatever comes next, a lot more people will be able to ‘fight back’ and being in a fighter plane is going to be a lot riskier.

Let’s say your transportation need (the mission) requires one vehicle to make a 150-mile round-trip at 60mph once/day. Would you rather have a $60K Tesla or a $20K Ford Focus? Or maybe you’d rather have three Fords for the price of one Tesla … that would provide a lot of redundancy.

Weak analogy in many respects, but given that military aircraft can be in only one place at a time, and given our global commitments, we’d be a lot better off with more hardware and a bit less software. Same with aircraft carriers, etc. If we’re dealing with simultaneous hotspots in Korea and Ukraine, I think we’d rather have 2 reliable fighters ready for deployment than 1 fighter having difficulty connecting to the cloud.

In 2002, the Air Force flew preditors in support of the Iraqi no-fly zone. However, harassment by Iraqi MiG fighters made it hard for the drone crews to complete their surveillance missions. And ever since that time the Air Force has been arming drones with air-to-air missiles for self-defence. And despite many drones being shot down during this time, not one drone has successfully been able to make a single kill defending itself – even against dilapidated third-world airforces like Iran.

So if you honestly believe front-line fighters are ready to be replaced with drones, we’re still decades away from that. Investment into more advanced drones is on-going – and the Air Force are looking at using the F-35 as a tactical level drone-controller in the future.